There is a lot more talk about healing out there than there is actual healing. Nearly all of our best intuition about how humans heal is simply wrong. But how we actually heal is relatively simple. We have experiences over and over that teach us different things than what the bad experience taught us. Sometimes what those new experiences can teach us is simply that the bad thing isn’t happening right here right now. That it’s over. The information stored in that memory in your nervous system is over. Real and concrete experiences that you can have today, right now in fact, can make a hot memory one that no longer hits you like the kick of a horse. And, you can heal in ways that are actually pleasant, distracting, or relaxing.
Flash shows that it is possible to process trauma as information rather than as distress. One of Flash’s biggest problems in reaching a broader audience is that there isn’t enough distress in it to seem like it could possibly work. We are so conditioned to expect distress to accompany trauma that we are skeptical of any trauma work that doesn’t involve it. This skepticism despite the fact that catharsis itself rarely actually leads to healing. Encounters with large chunks of distress in your own life have never resulted in healing, clarity, or insight. Even trauma therapists often make distress a prerequisite for healing to be believable. The ability to separate distress from trauma seems non-intuitive, like the ability to separate wet from water. Yet we know that trauma is information. If you are an EMDR therapist, you understand that. An individual piece of trauma is an individual instance of learning, an individual chunk of information.
And, how we work with that piece of information matters. Left to our own devices, we often try to work with too much. Rumination is a way to activate a lot of information all at once and make interpretations based on that spinning mass of information and have all the attached affect. EMDR Therapy, however, is much more focused. It’s memory-focused and is constructed in such a way that it helps us process chunks of information in individual memories by removing the obstacles and letting the trauma connect with adaptive information that other parts of the system somehow already know. Even in EMDR Therapy, we are working with slices of the experience at a time and standard protocol advises us to start with a salient slice, which can be a pretty thick slice of memory content.
There are other ways to work in EMDR Therapy that Shapiro mentions for complex trauma, including using the videotape approach that splits the memory into much smaller and more digestible pieces. Imagine a loaf of bread where we get one slice out of the loaf at a time and don’t get the next piece out until the current piece is consumed and mostly digested. I’ve worked in this way with clients with complex trauma and simply helping the client control the rate of information coming into working memory dramatically decreases the amount of distress experienced and it is a faster way to work with clients with complex trauma. Inside EMDR Therapy, there are many ways to do this. My videotape script for EMDR is linked in the notes section below.
Now, Flash. And what I’m about to describe is in reference to the Four Blinks Version (http://FourBlinks.com). Other versions may vary conceptually and practically. Imagine a deli slicer with the blade here and set on the thinnest possible slice. Other than touching the memory just enough to select it—drop it in the slicer—we are not referencing or working with the memory as a whole. We are only working on the right side of the blade one microslice at a time. We engage the memory for a fraction of a second and immediately container whatever tiny piece of the memory came out. Do you know what a tiny piece of the memory is? It’s a piece not big enough to have that much accompanying distress. It’s a piece not big enough for your parts to have many thoughts or feelings about. It’s too fast and not enough content to cause either shut-down or fuel rumination. And, again, do you know what that piece is? It’s information from the trauma that your nervous system is about to have six back-to-back experiences in the calm scene that show clearly and to all parts of you that that tiny piece of the memory isn’t happening right now because you are having an experience of safety, or amusement, or hunger, or astonishment. Those experiences in the calm scene are your embodiment of the disconfirmation. The little piece we container is the piece of the memory that is about to get fully or partially reprocessed in the next round of the calm scene. If we are only bringing a tiny slice of the memory into working memory at a time, where is the rest of the memory currently located? It’s not in working memory. It’s in the limbic brain (or wherever trauma is stored when it’s packaged up out of awareness… depending on the brain metaphor you are using). A good chunk of trauma literature assumes that touching the memory anywhere brings it into working memory. But maybe that’s not true. Maybe a memory is more divisible than that. It’s not like a proton or neutron that you can’t slice without incident. In fact, slicing it thinner may be how we avoid incident. Overactivation in trauma work slows everything down and starts up processes precisely designed to protect the system from that very type of activation.
The active ingredient in Flash is a large number of exposures to the calm scene. The purpose of the blinks every five seconds is to split each thirty-second experience to your calm scene into six five-second experiences. If you don’t blink in Flash, the memory still resolves, it just takes several hours instead of 30 minutes because it takes longer to the hundreds of experiences in the calm scene when you don’t break it into microexposures with blinks. Bruce Ecker is right. Humans heal when we have experiences that disconfirm the expectation in the bad memory. This happens hundreds of times in an average Flash session and the experience that you have in Flash does not have to be a precisely disconfirming experience the way it does in Ecker’s Coherence Therapy. Again, we are moving only one memory. A general mismatch works just fine. Ecker is trying to shift large memory networks associated with entire negative cognitions. The key that you need to unlock a moped is different from the key that unlocks the vault at Fort Knox. And we are taking the moped. With complex trauma, we take the moped.
Did you know that humans can process trauma while sitting in a positive state? My guess is that part of you will say no. I also suspect that other parts of you already know that this is the only way we have ever healed… by having disconfirming positive experiences. If you have ever had a transformational conversation with a close friend… do you know what you had? You had an experience. We are wounded experientially and we heal through experiences also. If you ever had a great EMDR reprocessing session, do you know what you had? Experiences that were different than the expectation in the bad memory. How do we heal from relational wounds? We heal relationally. We heal by having experiences in relationships that are different than the expectations in the bad experiences. What is parts work other than opportunities for parts of you to experience other parts of you in ways that are different than the expectation in the bad memories.
We are at the conundrum that I’ve been circling for several years now. We have very few ways for people with complex trauma to actually heal. Yes, we can resource them to the end of the universe, but actual healing… there aren’t that many ways to do that. What Flash can teach us about healing is that there are ways to process trauma that have remarkably little distress, that are reliable and predictable, that are associated with a very low risk of decompensation, that can be done easily in groups (which is also how humans once healed… in groups), that are safe and effective enough to be done self-administered, and that when done well will fully and permanently shift almost any form of stuck information. It does this with virtually no distress. And it does all of it using a model—that when we actually think about it—we already believe in as one of the ways that healing actually happens when it does happen. But we won’t believe it because it doesn’t feel intuitive. Our gut tells us we need different things. Because it’s not distressing enough. Because it doesn’t feel real or what we are used to. But we will do… even in our own private lives… I’m looking at you too, therapists… we will do endlessly the distressing thing over and over that has never—not even one time—moved the tiniest slices of stuck information.
We are attached to the wrong intuitions when it comes to healing. I blame cultures for this. The same cultures that wound us, teach us categories of emotion concepts designed to keep us stuck, teach us how to ruminate, teach us how to blame and humiliate ourselves for what was done to us, and highly shape our intuition about which forms of healing work and which are suspect. Healing yourself using culturally non-intuitive strategies may be one of the last truly revolutionary acts permissible for an individual in our cultures. Which is why I have been trying to make as much of this as I can absolutely free. If this is a way that humans can heal, then this healing pathway has been with us for as long as we have been human. Through all the bad wars, through all the bad moms, through all the horrible flu and epidemic weekends, through all the cultural ideas designed to divide us, through all the bad men we have had ways to heal that are fast, reliable, painless, and permanent. If this is a way that humans can heal, nobody owns that. These healing pathways are our common heritage, our common birthright, and a core function of being human. We have to figure out how to do this.
Someone is going to come along and see what approaches like Flash can teach us about how humans actually heal… and they are going to package it into some kind of psychotherapy, game, app, dance, meditation, or spirituality that will let us all see it. Really see it. And that isn’t just going to change what we do, professionally. It has the potential to change who we are as a species. We may become the kind of people who can actually heal and recover from our shit, rather than endlessly talking about and preparing to heal. We may be able to rescue ourselves and do something that the prior 50, 500, generations before us could not. We may be able to actually heal ourselves.
The videotape script that I reference is available in this free training on helpful strategies in the reprocessing phases of EMDR Therapy.
Four Blinks Version of Flash: An Open Approach To Trauma Reprocessing 